a murder in wellesley 283 “He was in a daze,” she said quickly. “He was in a total daze and he was blocking our driveway.” She had been diligently following the media-hyped trial on Court TV, Swerling said, and she had checked her computer for the letter. But pressed about her memory of sending it to the Wellesley police in 1999, Swerling admitted, “I just can’t. In all honesty, I don’t know your honor.” Delicately shifting to Swerling’s mental health issues, the judge asked her if she ever had “negative contact with the Wellesley Police Department.” “Yes, I have,” she quickly admitted. Waiting near the rear door of the courthouse for State Police to drive her home, Swerling told two Boston newspaper reporters she thought Dr. Greineder was innocent. “I’m totally partial to him to this point,” she said. “I’ve always doubted whether or not he did it based on what happened to us.” Watching the end of testimony on Court TV that morning, Swerling realized it was her last chance to find out why the Greineder investigators did not respond to her letter. “Why didn’t the Wellesley police get in touch with me?” she accused. “They never did. Shame on me for letting it go so long. Everyone had this man found guilty long before he went to trial,” she said defiantly, seemingly not fully aware of the uproar that she had inflicted on the professionally run trial. “If you had some weirdo in your yard like we did that morning, you’d have doubts too.” Meeting at the sidebar after Cunningham testified that a search of the police station had failed to turn up Swerling’s letter, Murphy indicated he might want to put Swerling in front of the jury but needed to consult with his client. Waiting for Swerling’s mental health records “from three different places,” the judge said he would not rule on the matter until morning. 25 Daylight brought another spectacular summer day in New England on Tuesday, June 26, and the lunacy that had filled the sweltering main courtroom at Dedham Superior Court the day before had dissipated with 284 tom farmer and marty foley the rising sun. Apparently deciding the negatives of putting Jackie Swerling before the jury far outweighed the potential benefit, Marty Murphy told Judge Paul Chernoff at the morning sidebar his client would not call the Wellesley woman. It would prove to be a smart move for Dr. Greineder because hours later the mystery jogger observed panting in Swerling’s driveway introduced himself to the Wellesley police. Patrick Libby, now a resident of the city of Somerville bordering Boston, had grown up in the Ingleside Road dwelling, and had stopped there during a run on Halloween 1999 to check the place out. Bent over in Swerling’s driveway catching his breath, the twenty-sevenyear -old Wellesley native had sensed a car behind him, and sheepishly jogged away after the male operator tooted the horn. Seeing the blanketing media coverage of Swerling’s misguided intrusion into the smoothly running trial the next day, Libby was aghast when he realized he was the mystery jogger and immediately called the Wellesley police. “I was kind of astonished I was connected to something like this,” Libby told the Boston Herald. “It was pretty surprising.” Murphy was slated to make his closing argument first. The defense attorney knew he needed a perfect finish if he had any hope of weakening the wall of evidence Rick Grundy had stacked against his client. Stepping to the plate for his last chance to make a direct appeal to the jury, Murphy belted a home run. Coming across fresh and rejuvenated, Murphy provided the jury with a passionate eighty-minute oratory, dramatically highlighting the key points favorable to his case. Before Dr. Greineder deserved to be branded “with the horrible label of being a murderer of one’s own wife, the murderer of the mother of one’s own children,” Murphy reminded the jury, his client’s guilt had to be beyond a reasonable doubt. Before they could do that, he cautioned, there were three questions they needed to consider. Did Grundy ever give them proof that Dr. Greineder wanted his wife dead? Did they ever hear a reason for Dr. Greineder to kill his wife? And most importantly, Murphy stressed, did Grundy give them any “real evidence” that Dr. Greineder had the capacity for pure evil? “Because there is no...

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